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Coleridge also contributed to Southey's Joan of Arc certain lines of which, many years afterwards, he wrote in this humorously exaggerated but by no means wholly unjust tone of censure: "I was really astonished at the schoolboy, wretched, allegoric machinery; at the transmogrification of the fanatic Virago into a modern novel-pawing proselyte of the Age of Reason a Tom Paine in petticoats; at the utter want of all rhythm in the verse, the monotony and dead plumb-down of the pauses, and at the absence of all bone, muscle, and sinew in the single lines."
"I was really astonished," he said, " at the schoolboy, wretched, allegoric machinery; at the transmogrification of the fanatic virago into a modern novel-pawing proselyte of the "Age of Reason," a Tom Paine in petticoats; at the utter want of all rhythm in the verse, the monotony and dead plumb-down of the pauses, and the absence of all bone, muscle, and sinew in the single lines."
One turn, and he would have been on his way, plumb-down, to the valley below say, rather, on his way off the face of the world into the vast that bosoms the stars and the systems and the cloudy worlds. His very soul quivered with terror. The pang of it was so keen that it saved him from the swoon in which he might yet have dropped from the edge of the world.
Then, as if in the exuberance of its rejoicing it had broken some law of the kingdom of harmony, it sank, plumb-down, into the purifying fires again; where the old wailing, and the old struggle began, but with increased vehemence and aspiration. By degrees, the surrounding confusion and distress melted away into forms of harmony, which sustained the mounting cry of longing and prayer.
I say love, because the life in them, the presence of the creative one, would ever be plain to him. In the Perfect, would familiarity ever destroy wonder at things essentially wonderful because essentially divine? To cease to wonder is to fall plumb-down from the childlike to the commonplace the most undivine of all moods intellectual.
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